By Troop Historian Anthony H
At the end of February, Troop 42 embarked on an exciting and frigid adventure!
Let me take you through the outing! First, we woke up early and met at Mr. Leong’s house to pack our bags. I wasn’t excited about the 3+ hour drive up there, but I was excited about my first time shoveling out a Quinzee (a poor man’s igloo) and hopefully sleeping in it!
Once we arrived at our location, we got out, gathered all of our stuff, which needed to either be in a sled that you had to tow or on your back. The first time I stepped into the snow, I sank so deep I needed to get pulled out by another scout. After accidentally overshooting the camp, we finally arrived, laid out all of our stuff, and started probing for a place with deep snow where we could build our shelter. Once we found a place with 8 feet of snow, we dug down a couple of feet and then buried a couple of garbage bags filled with air so we could dig them out and pull them out, leaving the snow hollowed out. After piling an additional two feet of snow onto the pile of snow, we left it to settle and harden.
While the shelters were sintering, we had lunch! Now it was time to wait and dig out the shelter. During this process, we carved out so much snow that we were able to make a barrier in case we had a sudden snowball fight. It felt like a literal Minecraft movie; we would jam out perfect squares and throw them out of the quinzee for someone to shovel out. After we were finished digging, we suddenly realized that we could see light coming through the snow, and we made sure to measure out the thickness so that hopefully we would not get buried under a couple of hundred pounds of snow.
Once we had carved out all the snow, it was time for dinner. We quickly unpacked our belongings and set up our pads and sleeping bags. My dinner consisted of Fritos and beef chili in the Fritos bag. After finishing dinner, we quickly cleaned our plates and threw out all evidence of food in a garbage bag. Then we wiggled back into our snow shelter and took off our wet socks and boots. And by this time, it was 7:30 PM.
Once we woke up, we had a couple of hours to spend playing after we finished packing everything up. We took all of our stuff out of the quinzee, and anything wet, we bagged in one big garbage bag inside each of our backpacks. I jumped on our quinzee once everything and everyone were out, and I punched a hole right through it! I fell through, and my feet landed on the ground, with my top half flailing around in the air. Luckily, I had punched a large enough hole for me to slide through.
After that, we ate breakfast, which was oatmeal. And when we finished packing up our gear, we
decided to take our sleds up a small hill and tried to go sledding, and most of us were pretty successful, but I was not able to fully get down the hill without having a yard sale, and tumbling down to a thick pile of snow at the bottom.
After we finished sledding, we strapped our packs on and snowshoed out of there. We got to the cars, loaded everything up, and we were off back down to sea level.